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Gun Bans Explained

One of the many frustrating things about government gun-bans is the seemingly naive imperviousness to the argument that it only disarms the law-abiding citizen, keeping the criminals armed.

It's so obvious -- why wouldn't they see?

What, do they want to give criminals an advantage?

The answer is stunning -- in Chicago's notoriously draconian gun-ban, it turns out that is EXACTLY what was intended!

The aldermen were crooked, and wanted to create a monopoly for the Mob:

Recently,The Justice Department prosecuted The Chicago Mob in a landmark trial. The Chicago Tribune reports:

In one of the biggest strikes in Chicago's history against the mob, federal authorities today began rounding up alleged organized crime figures—including outfit boss Joseph "The Clown" Lombardo—in connection with a string of 18 unsolved murders and one attempted murder dating back to 1970.

In the culmination of what officials dubbed "Operation Family Secrets," a federal racketing indictment unsealed this morning took direct aim at Chicago's three dominant mob chapters: The Grand Avenue crew of Lombardo; the Melrose Park crew of brothers Jimmy and Michael Marcello, and the 26th Street crew of imprisoned mobsters Frank Calabrese Sr. and his brother, Nicholas, who has turned mob informant.

Just whose name came up at the Family Secrets Trial as an unindicted co-conspirator of the massive racketeering enterprise? Chicago Alderman Fred Roti. Alderman Roti was named by the Justice Department on pages 27 and 47 of this civil racketeering indictment as a "high ranking made member" of The Chicago Mob.

Roti was no ordinary member, his job was to hijack Chicago's City Council which he did for 23 years. The Chicago Tribune explained how Alderman Roti ran Chicago's City Council in 1982:

Roti has placed nearly as many city employees on the payroll as the city personnel department,and many of them are his own family members...Roti's name is always called first during council roll calls, and he revels in that privilege. His initial response gives other administration alderman their cue as to what Roti-and, therefore, the mayor-wants. It's often said that roll calls could stop after Roti votes-the outcome is already known. Roti,an affable fellow, controls the Chicago City Council with an iron fist.

What could be more frightening than a "made member" of the Mob hijacking America's third largest city? Alderman Roti decided he wanted to ban guns in Chicago so honest citizens couldn't fight back against Chicago's Mob.

The Roti family's union power goes back to two late organized-crime figures, Ald. Fred B. Roti and Chicago Outfit boss Anthony Accardo, according to union investigators.

Bruno and "Toots" Caruso are nephews of Roti. The three were among 47 men identified by the FBI in 1999 as "made" members of the mob. "Made" mobsters, according to the report, pledge loyalty to the Outfit "and would carry this oath of commitment and silence to the grave."

If you take a oath to a racketeering enterprise you can't be serving the "public interest" of the citizens of Chicago. This means every ordinance that Alderman Roti voted on between 1968 and 1991 has the potential to be part of a racketeering enterprise. Which,of course,includes Chicago's gun ban.

So it's not misguided innocence.

It's not a philosophical difference of opinion.

It's a deliberate criminal enterprise designed to disarm you for the benefit of predators.

There it is, in black and white.

The need to be armed and suspicious of government motives is no crazy conspiracy theory anymore.

And President Obama came out of that very same corrupt Chicago political machine.

Some Amusing Videos

Happy baby in time-lapsed play -- hilarious:




Extreme basejumping with wingsuits -- thrilling and amazing:


wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Of course, we don't get to see the valley floor, littered with all the experimental wingsuits that didn't quite work...

Polywell Fusion Moving Forward

In mid-December it was reported:

The experiment, funded by the U.S. Navy, was aimed at verifying some interesting results that the late physicist Robert Bussard coaxed out of a high-voltage inertial electrostatic contraption known as WB-6. (The "WB" stands for Wiffle Ball, which describes the shape of the device and its magnetic field.)

An EMC2 team headed by Los Alamos researcher Richard Nebel (who's on leave from his federal lab job) picked up the baton from Bussard and tried to duplicate the results. The team has turned in its final report, and it's been double-checked by a peer-review panel, Nebel told me today. Although he couldn't go into the details, he said the verdict was positive.

"There's nothing in there that suggests this will not work," Nebel said. "That's a very different statement from saying that it will work."

By and large, the EMC2 results fit Bussard's theoretical predictions, Nebel said. That could mean Polywell fusion would actually lead to a power-generating reaction. But based on the 10-month, shoestring-budget experiment, the team can't rule out the possibility that a different phenomenon is causing the observed effects.

"If you want to say something absolutely, you have to say there's no other explanation," Nebel said. The review board agreed with that conservative assessment, he said.

The good news, from Nebel's standpoint, is that the WB-7 experiment hasn't ruled out the possibility that Polywell fusion could actually serve as a low-cost, long-term energy solution. "If this thing was absolutely dead in the water, we would have found out," he said.
...
Nebel and his colleagues have already drawn up a plan for the next step: an 18-month program to build and test a larger fusor prototype. "We're shopping that around inside the DOD [Department of Defense], and we'll see what happens," he said.

Nebel said some private-sector ventures are also interested in what EMC2 is up to, and that may suggest a backup plan in case the Pentagon isn't interesting in following up on WB-7.

For the time being, Nebel said his five-person team is getting by on some small-scale contracts from the Defense Department (including these three). "I've got enough to cover the people we've got, and that's about it," he said. "What we're doing with these contracts is trying to get prepared for the next step."

He's also waiting to see what the Obama administration will bring. Will the White House support EMC2's low-cost, under-the-radar fusion research program alongside ITER and the National Ignition Facility? "We just don't know," Nebel said.

See earlier posts here and here for background.

Real Scientists Repenting on Human Global Warming Fraud

Well well well, the now-retired NASA supervisor of James Hansen, the researcher who has made a 20-year career out of hyping global warming (and who is known to be VERY sloppy with his data), is slamming his former colleague.

In an e-mail to the U.S. Senate Committee for the Environment and Public Works, Dr. John S. Theon writes:

I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation. He was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). He thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system [That is true. --ed.] because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

NO. RATIONAL. JUSTIFICATION.

That's a scathing indictment.

Dr. Theon states:

As Chief of several NASA Hq. Programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research.

So he knows of what he speaks.

Hansen, on the other hand, has publicly called for those questioning human-caused global warming to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

Is that science, or Stalinism?

MOre are speaking out against him. In Launch Magazine, NASA physicist and Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham writes:

NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation of data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.
...
It doesn’t help that NASA scientist James Hansen was one of the early alarmists claiming humans caused global warming. Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him.

Warming in the upper atmosphere should occur before any surface warming effect, but NASA’s own data show that has not been happening. Global temperature readings—accurate to 0.1 degree Celsius—are gathered by orbiting satellites. Interestingly, in the 18 years those satellites have been recording global temperatures, they have actually shown a slight decrease in average temperatures.

Cunningham goes on to review how hard data does NOT support human-caused global warming claims, and that given how thin our atmosphere is, the greenhouse effect is nearly maxed-out already -- which is why most of the time historically the Earth is actually a frozen ball of ice!

When former NASA mathematician Ferenc Miskolczi pointed out that “greenhouse warming” may be mathematically impossible, NASA would not allow him to publish his work. Miskolczi dared to question the simplifying assumption in the warming model that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. He pointed out that when you use the correct thickness—about 65 miles—the greenhouse effect disappears! Ergo: no AGW. Miskolczi resigned in disgust and published his proof in the peerreviewed Hungarian journal Weather.

For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to accumulate—up about 4 percent in the last 10 years—the global mean temperature has remained flat. That should raise obvious questions about CO2 being the cause of climate change.
...
In the face of overwhelming evidence for natural temperature variation, proponents of AGW are resorting to a precautionary argument: “We must do something just in case we are responsible, because the consequences are too terrible if we are to blame and do nothing.” They hope to stampede government entities into committing huge amounts of money before their fraud is completely exposed—before science and truth save the day.

Make no mistake, cap-and-trade is just a massive wealth re-distribution fraud.

The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. [In other words, one one-thousandth of the effect, or 0.1%, at best. --ed.] That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming.

But wait, there's more!

The scientific tide is changing, even as the political clamor to be irrational grows; according to the Senate EPW site:

The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. Reports from the conference found that Skeptical scientists overwhelmed the meeting, with '2/3 of presenters and question-askers hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' (See full reports here & here).

Also,

the U.S. public has grown ever more skeptical of man-made climate doom predictions. [See: Global warming ranks dead last, 20 out of 20 in new Pew survey, and Survey finds majority of U.S. Voters - '51% — now believe that humans are not the predominant cause of climate change' - January 20, 2009 - Rasmussen Reports]

Can't fool all of the people all of the time! Indeed, as 9% "aren't sure" about global warming, only 41% blame humans -- which is a 9% drop since last July!

So in spite of the propaganda from the MSM, people are finding the truth in droves. How? The internet. For example, blogger Tom Nelson has been publishing very interesting graphs, which you can scroll through here. A few of my favorites are below.

The upshot is:
-- The sun is very important in driving temperature changes
-- Solar activity decreased rapidly from 1650-1700, starting the Mini Ice Age, and then increased from 1950-2000 back to medieval levels
-- Atmospheric CO2 has been MUCH higher in the past, and temperature has been all over the place
-- The "climate models" failed to predict the decrease in temperature we've seen over the last 10 years
-- James Hansen, rather than being muzzled, has been an outspoken alarmist to whom the MSM has given a sympathetic ear